Vinegar Girl

by Anne Tyler

  “Is still ridiculous,” Pyotr said. “Is so American, subtracting foods! Other countries, when they want healthiness they add foods in. Americans subtract them.”

  Bunny said, “How about, like, canned tuna? That doesn’t have a face per se. Could I get B-twelve from canned tuna?”

  Kate was so surprised at Bunny’s tossing off that “per se” that it took her a moment to realize their father was way, way overreacting to the suggestion of tuna. He was holding his head in both hands and rocking back and forth. “No, no, no, no, no!” he groaned.

  They all stared at him.

  He raised his head and said, “Mercury.”

  “Ah,” Pyotr said.

  Bunny said, “Well, I don’t care; I refuse to eat little baby calves that are kept in cages all their lives and never touch their feet to the ground.”

  “You are so far off topic,” Kate told her. “That’s veal you’re talking about! I never put veal in meat mash!”

  “Veal, beef, soft woolly lambs…” Bunny said. “I don’t want any of them. It’s wicked. Tell me, Pyoder,” she said, wheeling on him, “how can you live with yourself, making little mousies suffer?”

  “Mousies?”

  “Or whatever animals you’re torturing over there in that lab.”

  “Oh, Bun-Buns,” Dr. Battista said sorrowfully.

  “I do not torture mice,” Pyotr said with dignity. “They live very good lives in your father’s lab. Recreation! Companionship! Some of them have names. They live better than in outdoors.”

  “Except that you stick them with needles,” Bunny said.

  “Yes, but—”

  “And those needles make them sick.”

  “No, at current time they do not make them sick, which is interesting, you see, because—”

  The telephone rang. Bunny said, “I’ll get it!”

  She scraped back her chair and jumped up and ran to the kitchen, leaving Pyotr sitting there with his mouth open.

  “Hello?” Bunny said. “Oh, hi-yee! Hi, there!”

  Kate could tell it was a boy she was talking to because of the breathy, shallow voice she put on. Amazingly, their father seemed able to sense it too. He frowned and said, “Who is that?” Then he turned and called, “Bunny? Who is that?”

  Bunny ignored him. “Aww,” they heard her say. “Aww, that’s so sweet! Aren’t you sweet to say so!”

  “Who is she talking to?” Dr. Battista asked Kate.

  She shrugged.

  “It’s bad enough when she gets those…textings all meal long,” he said. “Now they’re calling her on the phone?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Kate told him.

  Kate would have choked on her own words, talking like that on the phone. She would have lost all self-respect. She tried to imagine it for a moment: getting a call from, oh, maybe Adam Barnes and telling him he was so sweet to say whatever he said to her. The very thought of it made her toes curl.

  “Did you speak to her about the Mintz boy?” she asked her father.

  “What Mintz boy?”

  “Her tutor, Father.”

  “Oh. Not yet.”

  She sighed and offered Pyotr another helping of meat mash.

  —

  Pyotr and Dr. Battista fell into a discussion involving lymphoproliferation. Bunny returned from her phone call and sat pouting between them and cutting her block of tofu into infinitesimal cubes. (She wasn’t used to being ignored.) At the end of the meal Kate rose and brought in the chocolate bars from the kitchen, but she didn’t bother clearing the plates and so everyone just dropped the wrappers on top of the remains of dinner.

  After Kate’s first bite of chocolate she grimaced; ninety percent cacao was about thirty percent too much, she decided. Pyotr looked amused. “In my country, is a proverb,” he told her. “ ‘If the medication does not taste bitter, then it will fail to cause effective cure.’ ”

  “I’m not used to expecting a cure from my desserts,” she said.

  “Well, I think it tastes excellent,” Dr. Battista said. He probably didn’t realize that his lips were pulled down at the corners like a Room 4 drawing of a frowny face. Bunny didn’t seem too pleased with the chocolate either, but then she jumped up and went out to the kitchen and returned with a jar of honey.

  “Put some of this on,” she told Kate.

  Kate waved it away and reached for the apple at the head of her plate.

  “Poppy? Put some of this on.”

  “Why, thank you, Bunnikins,” her father said. He dipped a corner of his chocolate bar into the jar. “Honey from Bunny.”

  Kate rolled her eyes.

  “Honey is one of my favorite nutraceuticals,” her father told Pyotr.

  Bunny offered the jar to Pyotr. “Pyoder?” she asked.

  “I am okay.”

  He was watching Kate, for some reason. He had a way of keeping his lids at half-mast, which made him seem to be arriving at some private conclusion as he studied her.

  There was a loud clicking sound. Kate started and turned toward her father, who waved his cell phone at her. “I think I’m getting the hang of this thing,” he said.

  “Well, quit it.”

  “I only wanted to practice.”

  “Take one of me,” Bunny begged. She put her chocolate bar down and dabbed her mouth hastily with her napkin. “Take one and send it to my phone.”

  “I don’t know how to do that yet,” her father said. But he snapped her picture anyhow. Then he said, “Pyoder, you were hidden behind Bunny in that one. Go over and sit next to Kate and let me take one of both of you.”

  Pyotr promptly changed places, but Kate said, “What’s got into you, Father? You’ve had that phone a year and a half and you never gave it a glance until now.”

  “It’s time I joined the modern world,” he told her, and he raised the phone to his eye again as if it were a Kodak. Kate pushed her chair back and stood up, trying to get out of the shot, and the click sounded again and her father lowered the phone to check the results.

  “I shall help wash the dishes,” Pyotr told Kate. He stood up too.

  “Never mind; that’s Bunny’s job.”

  “Oh, tonight why don’t you and Pyoder do it,” Dr. Battista said, “because Bunny has homework, I’ll bet.”

  “No, I don’t,” Bunny said.

  Bunny almost never had homework. It was mystifying.

  “Well, but we need to talk about your math tutor, though,” Dr. Battista said.

  “What about her?”

  “Spanish tutor,” Kate said.

  “We need to talk about your Spanish tutor. Come along,” he said, standing.

  “I don’t know what we need to say about him,” Bunny told her father, but she rose and followed him out of the room.

  Pyotr was already stacking plates. Kate said, “Seriously, Pyotr, I’ve got this under control. Thanks anyhow.”

  “You say this because I am foreign,” he told her, “but I know that American men wash dishes.”

  “Not in this house. Actually, none of us do. We just throw them in the machine and run it whenever it’s full. We take some out for the next meal, and then we put them back in and run the machine when it’s full again.”

  He thought about it. “This means some dishes are washed two times,” he said, “even though they were not eaten from.”

  “Two times or half a dozen times; you got it.”

  “And sometimes you are maybe using already eaten-from dish, by accident.”

  “Only if one of us has licked it really, really clean,” she said. She laughed. “It’s a system. Father’s system.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “A system.”

  He turned on the faucet in the sink and started rinsing plates. Her father’s system did not involve pre-rinsing; just send any scuzzy dish through the machine a second time, were his instructions. Besides, even without the second pass they would know it had at least been sterilized. But she sensed that Pyotr already disapproved enough and
so she didn’t try to stop him.

  Although he was running hot water, which was terrible for the environment and would have driven her father crazy.

  “There is no housemaid?” Pyotr asked after a moment.

  “Not anymore,” Kate said. She was putting the meat mash back in the fridge. “That’s why we have Father’s systems.”

  “Your mother passed away.”

  “Died,” Kate said. “Yep.”

  “I am sorry for your loss,” he said. He spoke as if he’d memorized the sentence word for word.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Kate said. “I never knew her that well.”

  “Why you did not know her?”

  “She developed some kind of depression right after I was born.” Kate was in the dining room now, wiping off the table. She returned to the kitchen and said, “Took one look at me and fell into despair.” She laughed.

  Pyotr didn’t laugh himself. She remembered he’d been reared in an orphanage. “I guess you didn’t know your mother, either,” she said.

  “No,” he said. He was slotting plates into the dishwasher. Already they looked clean enough to eat off of. “I was found.”

  “A foundling?”

  “Yes, found on porch. In box for canned peaches. Note said only, ‘Two days old.’ ”

  When he was talking shop with her father he had sounded halfway intelligent—thoughtful, even—but on subjects less scientific his language turned stunted again. She couldn’t find any logic to his use or non-use of article adjectives, for instance, and how hard could article adjectives be?

  She tossed her dishcloth into the hamper in the pantry. (Her father believed in 100-percent cotton dishcloths, used once and then laundered with bleach. He viewed sponges with an almost superstitious horror.)

  “Well, all done here,” she told Pyotr. “Thanks for helping. Father’s in the living room, I think.”

  He stood looking at her, perhaps waiting for her to lead the way, but she leaned back against the sink and folded her arms across her chest. Eventually, he turned and left the kitchen, and Kate went to the dining room to work on the income tax.

  —

  “That went well, don’t you agree?” her father asked her.

  He had drifted into the dining room after seeing Pyotr off. Kate totaled a column before she looked up, and then she said, “Did you talk to Bunny?”

  “Bunny,” he said.

  “Did you talk to her about Edward Mintz?”

  “I did.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “About what?”

  Kate sighed. “Let’s try to concentrate, here,” she said. “Did you ask her why she didn’t just get a tutor from the agency? Did you find out how much money he’s charging?”

  “He’s not charging any money.”

  “Well, that’s not good.”

  “Why not?”

  “We want this arrangement to be on a professional footing. We want to be able to fire him if he turns out to be no help.”

  “Would you be willing to marry Pyoder?” her father asked.

  “What?”

  She sat back in her chair and gaped at him, the calculator still in her left hand, the ballpoint pen in her right. The full import of his question slammed into her after several seconds’ delay—a kind of thud to the midriff.

  He didn’t repeat it. He stood waiting trustfully for an answer, with his fists balled up in his coverall pockets.

  “Please tell me you’re not serious,” she said.

  “Now, just consider the possibility, Kate,” he said. “Don’t make any hasty decisions till you’ve given it some thought.”

  “You’re saying you want me to marry someone I don’t even know so that you can hang onto your research assistant.”

  “He’s not any ordinary research assistant; he’s Pyoder Cherbakov. And you slightly know him. And you have my word as a reference for him.”

  “You’ve been hinting at this for days, haven’t you?” she asked. It was humiliating to hear how her voice shook; she hoped he didn’t notice. “You’ve been throwing him at me all along and I was too dumb to see it. I guess I just couldn’t believe my own father would conceive of such a thing.”

  “Now, Kate, you’re overreacting,” her father said. “You’ll have to marry someone sooner or later, right? And this is someone so exceptional, so gifted; it would be such a loss to mankind if he had to leave my project. And I like the fellow! He’s a good fellow! I’m sure you’ll come to feel the same way once you’re better acquainted.”

  “You would never ask Bunny to do this,” Kate said bitterly. “Your precious treasure Bunny-poo.”

  “Well, Bunny’s still in high school,” he said.

  “Let her drop out, then; it’s not as if it would be any loss to the world of learning.”

  “Kate! That’s uncharitable,” her father said. “Besides,” he added after a moment, “Bunny has all those young men chasing after her.”

  “And I don’t,” Kate said.

  He didn’t argue with that. He looked at her mutely, hopefully, with his lips tensely pursed so that his little black mustache bunched itself together.

  If she kept her expression impassive, if she didn’t blink or even open her mouth to say another word, she might be able to stop the tears from spilling over. So she was silent. By degrees she stood up, careful not to bump into anything, and she set down her calculator and turned and walked out of the dining room with her chin raised.

  “Katherine?” her father called after her.

  She reached the hall, she crossed the hall, and then she started pounding up the stairs with the tears positively streaming, flying off her cheeks as she arrived on the landing and rounded the newel post and ran smack into Bunny, who was just starting down. “Hello?” Bunny said, looking startled.

  Kate threw her pen into Bunny’s face and stumbled into her own room and slammed the door behind her.

  You could really feel physically wounded if someone hurt your feelings badly enough. Over the next few days, she discovered that. She had discovered it several times before, but this felt like a brand-new revelation, as sharp as a knife to her chest. Illogical, of course: why her chest? Hearts were just glorified pumps, after all. Still, her own heart felt bruised, simultaneously shrunken and swollen, and if that sounded self-contradictory, well, so be it.

  She walked to work every day feeling starkly, conspicuously alone. It seemed that everyone else on the street had someone to keep them company, someone to laugh with and confide in and nudge in the ribs. All those packs of young girls who’d already figured everything out. All those couples interlinked and whispering with their heads together, and those neighbor women gossiping next to their cars before they left for work. Eccentric husbands, impossible teenagers, star-crossed friends they gossiped about, and then they would break off and “Morning” they would say to Kate—even the ones who didn’t know her. Kate pretended not to hear. If she ducked her head low enough, her hair would swing forward so it completely hid her profile.

  The weather was more springlike now, and the daffodils were beginning to bloom and the birds were downright raucous. If her time had been her own, she would have worked in the garden. That always soothed her spirits. But no, she had to go to school every morning, and plaster a flashy smile on her face when she arrived at the main entrance where the parents were dropping their children off. Some of the younger children were still reluctant to say good-bye even this late in the school year, and they would cling fiercely to their parents’ knees and bury their faces, and the parents would send Kate a woebegone look and Kate would put on a commiserating, entirely fraudulent expression and ask the child, whoever it was, “Want me to hold your hand while we go in?” This was because Mrs. Darling was standing in the doorway, waiting for any excuse to fire her. Although so what if she were fired? What difference would it make?

  On her way to Room 4 she gave no more than a nod to any teachers or assistants she saw conversing in the corridor. She
said hello to Mrs. Chauncey and she stowed her belongings in the supply closet. As the children entered the room they raced over to catch her up on some piece of urgent news—a pet’s new trick, a scary dream, a present from a grandmother—and often several were speaking at once while Kate stood in their midst as still as a tree and said, “Really. Huh. Just imagine.” It felt like the most tremendous effort, but none of the children seemed to notice that.

  She went through the motions of Show and Tell, Story Time, Activity Hour. She took a break in the faculty lounge, where Mrs. Bower was debating cataract surgery or Mrs. Fairweather was asking whether anyone else had ever had bursitis, and they would all pause to greet her and Kate would mumble something like “Mmph” and let her curtain of hair fall forward as she proceeded to the restroom.

  Room 4 seemed to be passing through a particularly contentious period, and all the little girls stopped speaking to Liam M. “What did you do to them?” Kate asked him, and he said, “I don’t know what I did.” Kate believed him, too. Sometimes very complicated machinations went on with those little girls. She told Liam M., “Well, never mind, they’ll get over it by and by,” and he nodded and heaved an enormous sigh and threw his shoulders back bravely.

  At lunch she would stir her food listlessly around her plate; everything smelled like waxed paper. On Friday she forgot her beef jerky—or rather, she found the drawer at home empty although she could have sworn she still had some—and she didn’t eat a thing except a couple of grapes, but that was okay; she felt not just lacking in appetite but overstuffed, as if that swollen heart of hers had risen in her throat.

  At Quiet Rest Time she sat behind Mrs. Chauncey’s desk and stared into space. Ordinarily she would have flipped through Mrs. Chauncey’s discarded newspaper or tidied up some of the more clutter-prone play areas—the Lego corner or the crafts table—but now she just gazed at nothing and racked up points against her father.

  He must think she was of no value; she was nothing but a bargaining chip in his single-minded quest for a scientific miracle. After all, what real purpose did she have in her life? And she couldn’t possibly find a man who would love her for herself, he must think, so why not just palm her off on someone who would be useful to him?